The Age of Ice: A Novel (62 page)

She wept.

And there I was, a two-hundred-year-old fool . . . Barging in to claim my
prêt-à-porter
daughter, fantasizing how, with one strike of my magic wand, I would make all her troubles go away! What was my ice compared to her, only human, sorrow? A pseudo-problem, a comic book dilemma, a cartoon character’s quest. What did it matter that I’d lived for two hundred and twenty years—I still could not come up with words that could help her. All I could do was wrap my arm around her shoulders. Fatherhood as culpability with no statute of limitations. As responsibility and helplessness. Nothing more.

And yet . . . even as I was holding her while she wept, my horribly resourceful mind was already erecting its Ice Palace elsewhere—with my other daughter. There was nothing for me here, the ice of my mind was whispering, only human damage that I could not fix. But Marie must have been different—my true heiress. It is with
Marie
that my heart should dwell. Never mind that she’d married, that it meant she had been able to be physically close with a man, never mind that, she
had
to have ice in her! Therefore she could have survived in Siberia, that would be the best
place for her to survive, on Kolyma, yes, my daughter could have turned into a magic ice flower, no matter the GULAG machine, and nobody, not Cossack Feodor, not Joseph Stalin himself could have hurt her; they’re dead, they’re worm food now, while my beautiful daughter just sleeps peacefully in her sparkling cocoon, dreaming ribbon ice and hoarfrost, snowflakes and icicles—

Several snowflakes fell on Anna’s hair. It wasn’t the first time. In closed spaces snowflakes now sometimes materialize over me, when I am really cold. I brushed them off and rolled down the window. “Anna. Annie, Anya, Anichka, Annette, Anoosh. Do you hear me? You have to let go of Marie’s name. You can’t wear it like this. Your sister may not have perished. She is just deep inside Russia, hidden behind the iron curtain. And you have to give her back her name. It is important that you do it. Okay? Will you do it for me? Please?”

She eased from under my arm and wiped her tears off. She stared at the dashboard. “Okay.” She nodded finally. Glanced at me. “Tell me something out of your childhood. Just something small. Unimportant.”

So I did. “When I was five, I thought I was destined to be a circus clown.”

“Is that so?”

“Swear.”

“Why?”

Because my mother was a court jester.
And in translation to the twentieth century that would be: “Because my mother used to do burlesque and mime in pier theaters in English coastal resort towns. That, and music halls in winter. Father met her in Scarborough.”

She smoothed her rumpled face, tucked in a strand of hair. “Tell me how
our parents
met.”

I did.

Pierre, when we finally returned, measured us up and remarked, “What did you two do? You now start to look more alike. A real brother and sister.”

• • •

I opened a small trust fund for Anna. We exchanged letters and calls, and I visited them again on Christmas the following year. We settled into a relationship appropriate for an extended family. At the same time . . . I kept thinking about Marie. The daughter who
had
to have inherited my ice and who
would
have accepted me as a father. Marie was everything
Anna was not. Marie was perfect, Anna—far from it. But Anna was here, real.

Then Anna wrote her novel. It was published in France in 1971 and translated into English in 1975. It garnered enough notoriety at the time, and remains, I believe, on a feminist reading list to this day. It is titled
Ma vie sans une jumelle
.
My Life Without a Twin
.

It is a story of a girl who invents a rebellious twin sister in order to cope with her evil father and troubled mother, and then spends two decades of her adult life unable to dismantle the fantasy and drifting in passivity, while the twin usurps and sucks up all the action in the heroine’s life. The book was lauded as “tantalizingly autobiographic,” teasing readers’ sensibilities with a little preemptive note:
the names of characters have been changed
. Reading it hurt me.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

I called them at Christmastime in 1968, and Pierre told me they were not together anymore. They had separated. How? Since when? Since summer or so, he said, since the student riots. Anna had somehow let herself be drawn into those uprisings. All meetings and proclamations at first, and then it turned out there was a young man involved, a boy half her age.
The American,
Pierre referred to him fastidiously, some kind of a
rebel without a cause
. Her last postcard was postmarked in New York. “Alexander,” he said. “Our girl’s fifty-four. I know I should say she can do what she pleases, but all I can think of is how he’s going to hurt her. I’m getting old and sour, no? Or stupid?”

I asked him for the address on the postcard. I did not yet know what I’d do—but Pierre got ahead of me. “Oh, that’s right,” he said somewhat sheepishly. “You’re probably flying all over on business anyway.” Then he checked himself, “Or were you just thinking of writing to her? I’m sorry I’m—”

“I’ll go,” I said.
That’s what a father would do.

In Anna’s
Ma vie,
there is no Pierre. I am present, but as a newly discovered half brother. I had been sired by the heroine’s Nazi father with one of his detainees who later managed to start a new life in America. I make a surprise entry into the heroine’s life as a rich and handsome man, which event empowers her to break free from her fictitious twin.

• • •

In the purple-gray dusk of January, facades of the Fifth Avenue near Central Park always (this is my third visit in the twentieth century) remind
me of St. Petersburg, and the park itself is reminiscent of the Tavrichesky Garden, where Andrei Junior challenged me in a frozen pond. I take and hold a breath. For this brief moment I can pretend that time stands still. I gaze into the glowing sky and obstruct the flow of foot traffic.

Back into time, however. Seeing that the marquee of the once glamorous Tivoli Theater now said it played something titled
Gruesome Twosome,
made me feel world-weary as I walked down Eighth Avenue. Anna’s address was the Fulton Hotel, right above two more grind houses.
Bride of the Beasts,
lured one.
Stud Farm,
promised another.

Ma vie
describes the heroine scuttling down the fire escape stairs in silk polka-dot pajamas, diving in, hand in hand with her lover, for a midnight showing, the theater’s tiny lobby like “a plush red mouth.” Cuddling in the back row; her lover’s mouth finding her breasts. In her defense, back in those days that mouth (the theater’s, not the lover’s) was still a novelty, brushed and rinsed regularly.

Because of
Ma vie,
my recollection is double vision now, but I know what
I
saw when she opened the door. Day-old eyeliner, a kimono, a headband over a whipped-up bun of hair. Skinnier than I’d ever seen her. She stood ankle deep in scattered clothing, and the room behind her smelled of old carpet and whiskey. She held a tall glass of carbonated liquid, in which, secured between her index and middle fingers, stood a chopstick furry with bubbles. She must have just drunk out of the glass, her lips and cheeks were drawn together, moving. Seeing me, she extruded a drained lime wedge out of her mouth and dropped it back in the glass. “Alexander?” Her voice was husky. “What are you doing here?”

I stepped inside, kicking away a pair of man’s jeans. The only illumination in the room was from a garland of chili pepper‒shaped Christmas lights and a PUB sign across the street. The kid in the bed,
the American,
drew himself up and yanked at the torchère’s cord. “Who are
you
?”

He was offensively young and pretty. Bushy-haired; torso of a greyhound. Brash without even trying. “I’m the proverbial watchdog brother,” I said in English.

He snorted. “The who?” I traced his stare back to Anna. She leaned against the wall, mixing her drink with the chopstick. Her mouth was a line of many nuances, but its corners were sagely pointing down. We traded predictable phrases, in French.
So, you came to rescue me? —You tell me. Is it rescue time yet? —I don’t think so, no. —You think this kid is a
good idea? —Do you realize how rude you are right now?
Not for a father, I wanted to say.

“Hey! English please!” The kid sprang out of bed, snapped the waistband of his boxers adjusting them in place, lit a cigarette. “Ann? Where’re my pants?”

Your Adonis is half your age. Fit to be your son. —But he is not my son, Alexander.

“
Excuse
me.” The kid edged past me, found his jeans, pulled them on, zipped up, drawling around the cigarette in his mouth, “The brother . . . Man, what’s his problem?” He flipped on a TV set and tossed himself back onto the bed, smoking. “Tell him to go away.”

I would have liked him better if he’d offered to kick me out. But he seemed content to let the “adults” deal with themselves. I said to Anna,
He’ll ditch you.
She tugged at the kimono’s collar.
I know.
The TV erupted with sitcom laughter.
Who’s paying for this lovely room? —Oh, that’s what it is about! You’re here to protect your trust fund?
—
Don’t value yourself so low.

The Adonis looked for an ashtray, didn’t find it, and let the ash stack fall on the floor as he drew with the cigarette in the air as if circumscribing a picture. “No, I kind of like listening to the language I cannot understand. The chirp. It’s animalistic.”

Anna, let’s go. I have a hotel suite just a few blocks away. We can talk there.

Anna put her glass on the babbling TV.
I think it is better if you leave now,
she told me. I said,
Because he says so?
—
No, because
I
say so
.

I’m guilty as charged: deep inside me still lurks a tacky showman. Although: what father wouldn’t grab a chance to be a superhero for his daughter? Instead of leaving, I extended my hand to the Adonis and said in English, “Pleased to meet you. Hope you’ve already guessed my name.”

Looking amused, he freed his right hand by sticking the cigarette into his mouth, mumbled,
Sure, hi,
and accepted the handshake. I did not let go of his hand. The rest is easy to imagine.

I pictured myself as every one of those hand-clenching supernaturals, from
Don Giovanni
’s Statue of the Commandatore to Bela Lugosi. The kid scrambled to his feet, losing the cigarette.
Let go, psycho! What the fuck’s wrong with you?!
He shoved me in the chest but his eyes were already widening with awe, his trapped hand sucking all his attention.

“Hurts, don’t it?” I said.

Anna was next to me, tugging at my forearms, picking at my hand, finger by finger,
Stop it! Fine! I’ll go with you, let him be, let’s go! How stupid does it need to get, Alexander, I told you I’m coming!
She cuffed my hands in hers when I let go of the kid, she pushed me back and pled to the kid in nervous English,
Ricky, let go with it. Don’t anger. I will just go now for a little time, okay?

In
Ma vie
the fight is bigger, fists fly. The heroine wedges in, pushes us apart. Naturally, there is no mention of my icy
superpower—
she felt none of it.

She made me wait in the bathroom while she changed out of the kimono—perhaps to keep Ricky and me separated. I could not hear what he told her or what terms she left on.

• • •

I marveled at her as we walked through the lobby of my trusty old St. Regis Hotel. Her red lips made her look malnourished and she hid half her face behind dark sunglasses; the heels of her boots clacked somewhat defensively on the polished floors, and her greatcoat was not fur, but damn it, she could not help being elegant! A stuffy Middle American couple was riding the elevator with us, and I made a point of speaking to my daughter in deferential French. The couple’s suspicious glances turned curious.

I had booked a two-bedroom suite. Anna acknowledged it silently, as she opened doors to the second bedroom, tarrying on the doorstep.

It was a night, a day, and another night—not a month or so, as she claims in
Ma vie sans une jumelle
. The first night: we had a late-night dinner in the suite. We had drinks. We talked, we argued. We fought. The harshest thing I said was,
If you’re trying to reenact your sister’s rebellion, this is not how she would have done it.
She shouted,
Marie is dead! And you don’t know her, everything you know about her is what I had told you! So don’t you lecture me about her!
Those words stung me. I had forgotten, I realized, that my mental picture of Marie, being so familiar and
right
to me, was nonetheless a virtual fiction.

“You’re right,” I said.

Still, then: we fought but then we stopped fighting. It was past midnight, we sat on a sofa. The TV played a Spider-Man cartoon. She got up to pour us another Cognac. We drank in silence. She kept streaking her lower lip with the glass’s rim. Then she said, “I don’t want to grow old. Look at you: you look younger than you are. Just because you’re a male.
It’s unfair.” When I looked at her, she was weeping. This blindsided me with so much tenderness—and fear for her—that my heart seemed to have split and fled into all ten of my fingertips at once. I hugged her. Her hair smelled of Ricky’s cigarettes. I wanted to cradle her, tuck her in at bedtime, read to her out of some ancient book of fairy tales. I said, “You won’t grow old.” I meant it—and I did not mean it. I breathed into her hair and squeezed her in my arms. I was cold. But it did not matter to her. I missed it so much.

The next day, we strolled in the park. We went to the Metropolitan Museum. We shopped for new clothes for her, we dined. Had she told Ricky to wait for her? Would he bother? I did not ask. I hoped that there would be no need to talk about it. “I do not want to go back to France,” she said. I said she did not have to just yet. She could stay here, I could help her with that. She said, “I wish I could take a road trip through the States. And I hate it that I’m afraid to do it all by myself. In the heartland, an unaccompanied lady . . . is no lady at all. Don’t they say so?” I said I was not sure. She said, “Can you—possibly—stay in the States for a while longer and travel with me?”